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nine, and leaned back on their heels in characteristic, defensive/aggressive stance but the aunt stood straight enough to outface a battalion and shame them. Annabel looked at the photograph of the aunt and then at Lee. Putting her finger to his cheek, she removed a tear but he did not want her to think he was really crying.
    ‘That’s no authentic tear, love: my eyes, they water easily.’
    In fact, this tear both was and was not authentic. His eye disease rendered his tears ambivalent. But, since he had the simple heart of one who boos the villain, when, as he often did, he found he was crying, he usually became sad. Whether his tears were the cause or the effect of a grief or if this grief, when it was experienced, would define itself to him as a reaction to some arbitrary stimulus such as the picture of the dead woman whom he had loved or as a reflection on common mortality – these were questions he had not yet chosen or chosen to need to ask himself. So he usuallypretended he was not crying although he had the habit of crying easily.
    These were his two iconic photographs, that of a child named Michael and that of a family group. Buzz gave him a picture of himself and Annabel in bed asleep and that made a third, an image of a lover. Lee and Annabel looked like Daphnis and Chloë or Paul and Virginia; Lee, tangled in her very long hair, lay in the crook of her naked shoulder for she was taller than he and they looked as beautiful and peaceful as if made in heaven for one another. Lee kept these photographs in an envelope with their three birth certificates and, later, his marriage certificate. But he could find no causal connection between his three photographed faces. The infant, the child and the adolescent or young man whose face was still so new, unused and incomplete seemed to represent three finite and disconnected states. Looking in the mirror, he saw the face of a stranger to any of them with features which had been filtered through his wife’s eyes and subjected to so many modifications in the process that it was no longer his own. There seemed no connecting logic between the various states of his life, as if each had been attained, not by organic growth but by a kind of convulsive leap from condition to condition. He felt no nostalgia for the innocence he found upon his old, cast-off faces, only a fierce indignation he should ever have been innocent enough to surrender his freedom. For now his once desert room where he had lived as aridly alone as Crusoe on his island with only Buzz for a sullen, undutiful Friday – now this room was choked with things, painted out in thick, dark colours and filled with such a rich, sombre gloom one took a deep breath before stepping over the threshold, knowing one was about to plunge into another, heavier kind of air.
    In this cavernous, mysterious room, he hugged her tightly for he knew that duplicity thrives on physical contact. Here, where she and her furniture were sunk together in the same dream, she had at least a shape and an outward form; she had the same status as a thing, as her sofa possessed, or her sideboard with the lions’ heads.Here, she was an object composed of impervious surfaces. But when she walked beside him down the street in her randomly assembled clothes, she was quite wispy and tenuous, like a phantom rag-picker. She was tall and very thin. Her hands were long and the veins stuck out from them in thick bunches like the veins on the freckled hands of old women. Her feet, also, bulged with swollen and protuberant veins. Because of her meagre build, she seemed still taller than she was, a sparse, grotesquely elegant, attenuated girl with a narrow face and hair so straight it fell helplessly down around her as a mute tribute to gravity. She had prehensile toes that could pick up a pencil and sign her name. She stole.
    Lee was horrified to find she stole. She stole food from supermarkets and books from bookshops; she stole paints, ink, brushes and